That is the power of testimonials and social media reviews and user generated contents like comments!

That is the power of testimonials and social media reviews and user generated contents like comments!

In fact Facebook is still the social network par excellence, because almost everyone has a Facebook account, and therefore already a registered name & surname, as well as a profile photo. It is the best way to get the pulse of people that matters to your ecommerce website.

Collecting the testimonials and hardening your credibility!

• Getting you fan page setup for testimonials is great, but it must be filled with information relevant to your target audience.
• Get your best foot forward!
• Do a mass mailing on your database or contact them separately via Facebook to invite them to leave a message on the page. It is clear that in some areas people do not want to post a message (especially if you sell for adult) your customers do not necessarily want to have their identity publicly disclosed
• Moderate the comments! Be available to your fans as much as possible!

What if there is a negative feedback?

That is a really good problem. A lot of merchants do not support negative feedback, but this one I know, negative feedbacks are sometimes the best elements that will make your testimonial page credible. In comparison to YouTUBE, even a very good videos have about 10% negative feedback! So a page of only positive testimonials can also confuse your visitors and a little suspect! The secret and simplest method is certainly to answer every testimony and review in the page, it will affirm your presence and increase the level of your credibility.

In conclusion:

Social Media testimonial and reviews have now become an integral part of doing business online. There is just no going around it. Ours is a social media driven ecommerce world! Either you swim with it or sink! Use it to drive your ecommerce business credibiity further up and in so doing increases your revenue and expand your business!

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How to Solve the 5 Common Drop Shipping Problems every drop shippers face!

Drop shipping has become a buzz in the ecommerce world these days and for good reasons, ecommerce merchants and internet marketers are exploring it.

You just need to check out reddit to confirm it. Drop shipping is easily one of the hottest topics that generates a lot of comments and reactions. And I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel telling me it is going to subside soon.

Why Drop Shipping is a hot topic for ecommerce merchants?

The biggest reason why drop shipping is a hot topic for ecommerce merchants is that, drop shipping appears to be an ideal way to start an ecommerce store and it seems so easy to do too for many. Let’s take a look first at the advantages and disadvantages of running a drop shipping ecommerce store.

Advantages of drop shipping at a glance.

• You don’t have to hold any stock.
• Your financial involvement is minimal. Hell, you can start a drop shipping eCommerce store for almost nothing.
• You don’t have to worry about fulfilling orders and, a thing that attracts so many to this form of eCommerce,
• You can run it practically from anywhere. You can be sipping your coffee in the hot Rio morning while your running a drop shipping store from the US.

Major disadvantages of drop shipping you might need to know.

• When you run a drop ship business, you are ultimately giving away the control of a massive portion of your business to someone else.
• It is not you but a producer or a drop shipper that process your orders.
• You have very little influence over when that’s going to happen. You might be on top or at the bottom of a queue but you simply don’t know.
• You can’t control the packaging and what goes into the pack and all that is just the tip of the iceberg.

In short, after you have passed on the order, your control over what happens with it ends. And this is where most drop shipping problems starts to crop up.

Read full post 5 Common Drop Shipping Problems!

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Discover the power of layered navigation module

A good e-commerce site must be able to offer an easy and better search options for customers to facilitate access to products and that will lead to a faster decision to buy, this can be done with  the power of Layered Navigation module.

Today, we are going to be learning What the layered navigation module does? How to set up filters with attributes and features and discover the many possibilities this module can offer for your ecommerce website development.

What does Layered Navigation do for your prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce?

Layered Navigation module hooks to category page, and basically, allows you to choose between many search options and gives users the ability to fine tune their product search, and filter it as much as they want. Your users and customers can filter their search by the categories they want or by attribute and features they are looking for. There are filters for exclusivity and availability, and many more. You can also do filter search by manufacturer, and filter by the product condition – if it is new or second hand, or perhaps by product color search. Lots and lots of good stuff you can do with layered navigation that is impossible to do with out it.

Why do you need a layered navigation module in your product category page?

When you have a few products or say 50 products this question will not arise, but when you have thousands of references the layered navigation module comes in very handy, helping users to squeeze the results out to find the right product they are looking for in your website. This module uses product properties such as attributes and  features to refine the search. See the left column on the image below of a  product filter options. It comes really handy when searching for a particular item among tens and hundreds of items in an ecommerce store.

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Separate ecommerce website development versus Multi-store website development.

Separate ecommerce website development versus Multi-store website development.

Each has its merits and demerits. For our part, we have had customers who asks us if it is cheaper to do multi-store than another separate website. Our answer is No, not necessarily cheaper or better. As far as speed of development, yes, actually we save time in the beginning because we will just be cloning the original shop, but once we are caught up in the configuration that must be done again and again: re-testing processes, integrating the theme, etc. According to our experience, in the end having a multi-store is more complicated than to build a new independent and separate ecommerce website.

Advantages and disadvantages of Multi-store ecommerce website

• Multi-store’s biggest advantage is of course, is its ability to manage all your ecommerce websites in one single administration area. You do not have to login to another interface every time you need to do admin stuff for your particular store. The other advantages are listed below:
• Essential in keeping track of your orders and stock supplies right under one admin console.
• Save valuable time in adding of products and categories. You can easily manage which product or categories are being shown in which stores. If you are using same products for all of them, you only have to add them once instead of doing so separately for each store.
• Your stores can still be made to look different and have different domain names.

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What can you do to better protect your Prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce website from chargeback?

What can you do to better protect your Prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce website from chargeback?

• First off, get your refund policy as detailed as possible. Exhaustive as possible.
• Secondly, check the customer’s billing and shipping address everytime. If billing and shipping don’t match, beware on anything over a couple hundred bucks. If billing is a PO Box and shipping is a physical, it might be fine, but it’s still a red flag. If billing and shipping are two distinct physical addresses, unless one is a business, bigger red flag.
• As a seller you will always bump into people who will cheat you out your money. People who provided their real info, are usually what we call “friendly” fraud. Also, any type of chargeback insurance is not really solving the problem as this can lead to the fraudster repeatedly taking advantage of your service, which leads to the insurance provider charging you more premium.
• Prevention is your key.  Study and check your orders closely, getting CC numbers and doing BINN lookups to find the issuing banks, and asking their fraud departments to reach out to the cardholders. It takes a lot of work, but fraud losses will go down.

Chargebacks will never go your way, and that’s not just a Shopify thing. Chargeback happens to all Prestashop and thirtybees ecommerce websites, or Magento. Even with signature confirmation on your shipment, the carriers don’t check ID, so the banks always side with the customer. It sucks, but it’s the way it is.

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What does US Leaving UPU Mean for Your E-commerce Business

What does this mean for Ecommerce website owners and managers?

• The bigger effect of this will most likely be, that shipping 1-10$ gadgets from China won’t be free anymore, or 1$. You can basically say goodbye to this. Currently delivering China gadgets is the biggest loss to all National mail carriers everywhere on the world.
• Shipping fees cost will most likely be similar across continents. Flattening out the playing field.
• European shippers have to say goodbye to free import taxes up to 22€ and no processing fee. So people order China packages on daily basis just to be under 22€ limit. But that will soon change, as post will start charging around 6-7€ processing fee for every single package that is coming from outside European Union. So ordering 10 small packages with low value products and free shipping will soon going to be expensive, as shipping fee could be bigger than value of the order.
• Other shipping companies will have a big opportunity to fill the void left by USPS. The USPS conundrum is going to create opportunities for other carriers like DHL and FedEx to ensure continuity of service, though these options will inevitably be more expensive — possibly double or even triple pre-withdrawal rates.
• Prepare for WW3.. this one is to keep you on you toes. 

Overall this seems like something everyone involved in ecommerce should be aware of. Not a whole lot we can do to prepare since it’s not yet clear exactly how things are going to unfold. Nothing like uncertainty and potential major business disruption in the last quarter of the year.

Let us know what you think? Was US leaving UPU a good move for them? Will this bring better sale and opportunity for your prestashop – thritybees ecommerce website that ships outside US? How about from US?

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What does US Leaving UPU Mean for Your E-commerce Business

How to Speed Up Your Prestashop and Thirtybees Shop: 5 Tips to Optimize Performance

PrestaShop and its fork, Thirtybees ecommerce are open source platforms that allow anyone to create their own online shop. Written in PHP, PrestaShop and its fork, Thirtybees ecommerce are popular solution for websites of all sizes thanks to its wide selection of add-ons. Check out each of the 5 tips below for advice on how you can speed up your own PrestaShop site.

1. First off You Must Combine, Compress and Cache

This option will condense all of your CSS, JS, and HTML into single lines of code, therefore, getting rid of any white space or unnecessary characters. What this will do is to make your file sizes smaller, and your web pages will load faster. From the top menu bar, look under the Advanced Preferences tab and click on Performance. Then, look for the CCC option.

Choosing a Cache Module
The importance of implementing a cache module cannot be underestimated. On top of reducing page load times by several seconds, in some cases, they can drastically reduce your server load since delivering cached files consumes minimal resources.

However. not all caching modules are created equally. There are free ones out there, but if you are a serious online store owner/manager, you should invest in a premium option like Cache API.

Prestaspeed Cache Module is an API that creates static html files from your prestashop or thirtybees webshop and encrypt the cached pages.

When a page is rendered, php and mysql are used. Therefore, system needs lots and lots of RAM and CPU resources. Imagine if thousands of visitors come into your site all requesting the same content, it’s a good thing, but what these visits does to your system is use lots of RAM and CPU so your page now is rendering like a snail on a freeway.

In this case, you need a cache system not to render page again and again. Guarantee your ecommerce website page load with Prestaspeed Cache API module that generates a static html file, encrypt, and saves it for faster load time of up to less than a second. Incredible!

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